At the end of January, production company Dead Poets Live came to the Gate Theatre, as part of the ‘Gatecrashers’ series. The final show of three was a performance of Louis MacNeice’s long poem Autumn Journal. The full poem was performed in just over ninety minutes by Irish actor Éanna Hardwicke, known for roles in The Sixth Commandment, Normal People and the upcoming 2002 World Cup film Saipan. The performance saw Hardwicke dash about the stage holding a copy of the poem, his performance ebbing and flowing with the many peaks and troughs of the poem. The poem itself was written at the end of 1938, and was borne out of the anxiety of pre-World War II Britain. It frantically moves from topic to topic, from topos to topos and from question to question. I was myself left with a number of questions, too, after the final bow, with the most pressing one being; why don’t we see more dramatic performances of poetic works? Why is this ‘niche’ reserved only for one particular theatre company? And why is it a ‘niche’ at all? In truth, if other such performances are directed in such a standard manner as Autumn Journal was, I don’t see them ‘taking off’.
Louis MacNeice was a Northern Irish poet who came of age during the inter-war period in Britain. One of Irish literature’s most enigmatic and complicated figures (and that is saying something, considering the rest), MacNeice was born in Belfast to a southern Protestant Unionist father. He transcends the binary understanding of the North and his poetry too, he contains multitudes, he is more complex than any box that any reader will try to shove him into. As he says in ‘Snow’; ‘World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural’. Autumn Journal, too, contains multitudes and natural contradictions that occur in such a wide scope. Over the ninety-seven minute runtime, Hardwicke, as MacNeice, embodies the love, the grief, the despair and the passionate intensity that comes at the audience in a flurry. Though the lighting and sound shift with the flow of the performance, the production feels like it lacks something. Hardwicke seems very isolated, and so, feels distant from the audience. For a piece that the director. introduced to us as being ‘of all time’, the isolation of Hardwicke through singular and standard direction places the poem firmly in a time other than ours. This isolation was exacerbated by the choice to sit around a dozen people on stage to watch Hardwicke as a second audience. It felt as if Hardwicke was closed in and restricted.
The poem, formatted as a journal, follows MacNeice as he attempts to go about his days in London during the autumn and winter of 1938, as tensions rise on the continent and the poet’s thoughts are interrupted. by memories of Spain, memories of France and memories of a past love. As his love is lost, so too is his beloved Spain lost to war, as the rest of Europe soon will be. These anxieties are delivered in a frantic and phrenetic manner by Hardwicke. There is no clear shape to his performance, he lets MacNeice’s words dictate his actions rather than attempting to impose an interpretation that would bring cohesion to a poem that decidedly rejects cohesion. This allows Hardwicke to accentuate the moments of clarity that do appear in the poem. These are few and far between, but they are sweet.
The best thing about the show was the poem itself and Hardwicke’s performance of it. Though the overall production may have left me wanting more, I can still greatly appreciate what Dead Poets Live achieves, and I would love to see more of their work in Dublin. Additionally funds from the show went to The Capuchin Day Centre in Dublin City: a great cause, no doubt.
